


Sympathy for the Devil

by Chronolith



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Allura (Voltron)-centric, Alternate Universe - Demons, Alternative Universe - Bookshop, And Then It Got Out of Hand, F/M, I swear I thought this was going to be short, Voltron Valentine's Day Exchange, Witch!Allura, demon!Lance, ill-advised deals seem to be my thing
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-02-14
Updated: 2018-07-21
Packaged: 2019-03-18 10:20:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 12,618
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13679742
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chronolith/pseuds/Chronolith
Summary: She laughs a bit at herself. “Like that would actually summon this, er, Lancer? Right.”“Lance, actually,” says a male voice with the oddest accent she can’t quite place—vowels slurring into consonances as if he’s used to words that have twice as many. “They never did quite get that one right.”Allura accidentally summons a demon. Things go about as well as one would expect.





	1. please allow me to introduce myself (what's my game)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [imperiality](https://archiveofourown.org/users/imperiality/gifts).



“And don’t speak Latin in front of the books!” Coran calls over his shoulder as he sidles out the door.

“Buffy quotes, Coran?” Allura yells back, pausing with a book in each hand. “Really?”

“No Latin!” He yells without any indication of dignifying her jab. She sighs heavily as the door swings shut with a heavy thud, friendly chimes tinkling in her uncle’s wake. 

“No Latin,” she repeats back to the books, pulling a face. “So, Akkadian would be perfectly acceptable?”

She sighs when the books, naturally, remain silent—preferring to impart their wisdom visually. That’s assuming, of course, they had any such inclinations towards sentience. Which she sincerely doubts. Coran, she feels, patterns a little too much of his image on Mr. Giles—the affectation was cute, but sometimes. Just, _sometimes_. 

But the offer of a job over the summer holidays is a welcome one, particularly when said job is working Coran’s cute little bookshop. Weird, for sure, with its eccentric shelving system and Coran’s erratic sense of interior design, but welcome. Not all of her friends were able to find such easy summer employment.

Allura hums tunelessly as she shelves Coran’s latest haul of books from some estate sale. It's always a little tragic, Allura feels, the way someone’s entire library ended up for sale. Beloved copies of children’s stories mixed with law texts and cookbooks. A person’s entire life could be discerned from their library, Allura thinks, and it’s a little sad how the entire thing could be bundled off into a couple of ratty boxes to the local used bookstore.

She turns over the ancient leather tomb in her hand and wonders idly who had held it before her. Who had pulled it from its shelf in some shop, run curious fingers over its spine, spread open its pages and spent leisurely time in exploration there. She wondered if they had loved it, forgotten about it, hated it but was too lazy to sell it along. She wondered if it had a place of pride on some spinster’s shelves.

The book itself is lovely—soft leather dyed a deep ruby and worn thin along the corners, pages heavy and smelling of sage, faded gold lettering declares itself to be the _Ars Goetia_. Pretentious and latin, Allura notes with fond amusement, precisely Coran’s favorite. She runs a thumb along the pages just to hear them ripple and ruffle with a satisfying thrum of fluttering pages.

“ _Ars Goetia_ ,” she says to herself, just to hear the syllabus—round and heavy and ponderous. It almost feels as though the book vibrates in her hands, trembles a little at the sound of its name, as if waiting. Allura laughs a bit under her breath at her own foolishness. Coran’s oddness and the sudden whispering silence spilling across the bookstore leading her to flights of fantasy.

She moves to shelve the books and then frowns, finding herself in front of the shelves dedicated to self-help and Coran’s weird fixation with those quirky modern self-help books. The ones that proclaimed they could help you find your ‘inner power’ and get in touch with ‘your personal force’ and were almost always authored by someone named Moonwater Silverclaw or Marrion Ravenwing or something suitably ridiculous.

“I don’t think you belong with this mess,” she says to the book. “You’re a bit too serious for them.”

It feels, Allura thinks, a bit like putting a warhorse out to pasture with a bunch of circus ponies. She runs a thumb along the embossing of the title while she wanders the store. Eventually she fetches up against a shadowed shelf along the back wall, nearly hidden by a random arch leading to the little sitting room Coran had done up as a place for patrons to sip (truly atrocious--she really needs to teach Coran how to use the espresso machine) coffee and peruse books their guilty consciences would almost always lead them into buying. Running fingers along the cracked leather of the books, she silently mouths the titles. _Pseudomonarchia Daemonum, Corpus Hermeticum, Magia naturalis_. 

“I think I’ve found your fellows,” she tells the book. “Old and pretentious and Latin. But lovely.”

She can’t help but run a thumb along the spine of the book again, feeling absurdly guilty for the potential slight. “Definitely lovely.”

There’s an obscure comfort in old books, Allura thinks. Something in the way that they have passed through generations, changing hands, sometimes changing continents, and yet their contents and the secret worlds they contain continue from reader to reader. Each reading a little different than the last, their story like a river you know but never come to quite the same. The book in her hand feels warm, probably from her holding it for so long—the warmth of her hands seeping into the ancient, cracked leather—and its weight a satisfying heft in her grasp.

She glances guiltily, furtively towards the door. She has less than half an idea of where her uncle has scampered off to, but she can’t imagine it’s a quick errand (no errand undertaken by Coran will ever be quick, he apparently knew three-fourths of the town and Strong Opinions about the other one-fourth). Time enough, she thinks, for a little break.

Allura tucks herself in one of the great leather chairs Coran has shoved between a pair of towering bookshelves of dubious structural integrity and pops the book up on her knees. It has that unmistakable old book smell that will always be a comfort. The pages crinkle under her fingers as she flicks open the book and frowns at the sprawling Latin script.

She turns the book around in her hands for a moment, checking the spine and then the cover plate, there was no way the book could be any where close to as old as it purported itself to be. “1903,” she snorts inelegantly. “My shapely _ass_.”

But the pretentious and overdone language—seriously, this Aleister Crowley needed an editor who would pull the living room curtains out of his mouth on regular intervals—and the lovely hand drawn diagrams are surprisingly engaging. Allura finds herself flipping through the pages with an amused smile curling on her lips. It’s not unlike listening to a favorite, if dotty uncle go on about old stories every one knew were tall tales and fanciful exaggerations. But, well, she’s fond of dotty uncles and their silly stories.

“Eligos,” she murmurs under her breath. “Voco te. Nunc et,” she squints for a moment at the odd bit of notation doodled in the margins of the page. She turns the book slightly, puzzling at the looping handwriting. “Um. In hora meae opus?”

For a moment she gets the oddest feeling that the silence is listening to her—turning her words over and over like pieces of fragile glass and knocking them together to test them for their worth. Allura catches herself holding her breath, Coran’s warning running through her head like a poorly sampled song. 

But the feeling passes like a spring rain—easy and easily forgotten. 

She laughs a bit at herself. “Like that would _actually_ summon this, er, Lancer? Right.”

“Lance, actually,” says a male voice with the oddest accent she can’t quite place—vowels slurring into consonances as if he’s used to words that have twice as many. “They never did quite get that one right.”

Allura’s entire body freezes—blood turning into ice, breath going short and airy—as she turns her head slowly to stare up at a boy who grins back down at her as if he made a regular habit of just materializing in the middle of old bookshops and terrifying unsuspecting girls. While she’s still trying to remember how to make her throat work, he reaches out and plucks the book from her numb fingers. He turns it from side to side, head tilting to the side in inquisitive bemusement.

“Oh, _Ars Goetia_ , man, it’s been a while since someone’s trotted that old thing out,” he says, like he talks about old occult tombs on the regular. “Explains the sudden summoning.”

He's got horns, she notes distantly. _Horns_.

He holds the book out to her on the tips of his fingers, the smile that curls around his mouth makes her squirm with odd anticipation and dread, and she does her best not to stare at his eyes—so blue they seemed to burn like a high gas flame. Allura takes _Ars Goetia_ from him gingerly, as if he would snatch it back, or the book might suddenly fly up and bite her. Something.

“Um,” she says with all the eloquence of her very expensive philosophy degree. “Summoning?”

One dark eyebrow arches as he tilts his head slowly to the side, reminding her of nothing so much of a cat considering a very slow, very stupid mouse. “You know, the bit with the book, and the incense, and the Latin? I would imagine you’d remember, what with you being there an all."

“Um,” she says again, since that particular conversational gambit had been so successful the first time.

“Oh man,” he heaves a sigh and rolls his eyes expressively. His pupils were long, narrow slits vivisecting his eyes neatly—dilating down to thin slits like a cat’s. Allura has a faint, distant thought that she’s gaping like an idiot. “Look, I know it’s probably a great big shock, but surprise! You did indeed successfully summon Eligos, one of the twenty-three grand dukes, ruler of the sixty black legions, finder of the hidden, strategist of hell, seducer of lords, blah blah blah. I go by Lance these days. What did you want?” He leans in close to her, nearly spilling down the back of the armchair, his eyes pin her where she sits. “What is your daring wish?”

“I, er,” Allura blinks at him, tossed over and under by the sudden wave of words—not a one making any sort of sense. “Wish?”

He drops his head between his arms where he has them stretched out in front of himself across the back of her chair. “Seriously?” he whines, rolling his head against back of the chair. His horns curled back along the sides of his head, tips ending in sharp, silver points. Allura wonders how much it cost to have them custom made. “Did you just summon me to, what? Gape? _Ugh_.”

“I didn’t summon you,” Allura denies then bites the inside of her mouth. This was foolish, she chides herself. Getting caught up in his melodrama. She closes her eyes and draws in a deep breath, chest rising and falling like a great wave. When she opens her eyes he’s regarding her with an amused little half smile that makes things itch under her skin. “Look,” she says with a calmness she absolutely does not feel. “I admire your dedication to the role—your costume is impressive!—but don’t you think this prank has gone on a bit too long? Take those horns off, they are ridiculous.”

Now it’s his turn to gape. Allura takes perhaps more satisfaction than is strictly necessary or kind at the way he blinks at her, mouth moving in silent protest. He has fangs, she notices, delicate little fangs that are very, very white against the deep red of his lips.

“You have an excellent costume,” she says to make up for the insult to his horns—but they are ridiculous and overdone, great big sweeping things of silver and black that must weight a ton. “I especially like the contacts.”

“She likes the contacts,” he says softly and blinks those impossibly blue eyes at her. “Right.”

“Did my uncle put you up to this prank?” She asks, honestly curious. “He can be very whimsical.”

“ _Prank_ ,” he repeats, sounding as if someone was trying to throttle every last bit of air out of him. “ _Prank!_ ”

“Er,” Allura says intelligently. “Yes? You didn’t really expect anyone to believe you were actually a demon, did you?”

He flings his hands up with a great wordless shout—perfectly timed with a random clap of thunder and she didn’t even notice the storm roll in—and throws himself away from the chair with enough force that it, with her in it, squealed several inches across the wood floor. She clutches at the arms of the chair and scowls at him. “There’s no need for that.”

He doesn’t look at her—choosing to instead stomp around Coran’s cute little sitting room, arms flailing and ranting in a language she doesn’t understand. Clearly swearing enough to singe the eyebrows right off a nun. He spins on one heel and points at her. “Witch!”

Allura sputters in wordless offense. “Rude!” she snaps back.

“Do you have any idea of what you’ve done?” He barks at her. “Any at all?”

“I called you out on your foolishness?” She says, still sputtering slightly. “Refused to play along with whatever prank you and my uncle are trying to play? I know it’s my first day tending the shop alone, but this is ridiculous.”

He runs his hands over his horns and makes a high, whistling noise not unlike a kettle left on heat for too long. He closes his eyes and breathes in deep—Allura bites her lip when she notices, and gods how did she not notice before, the way the chains across his bare chest move and catch the light—like a man about to plunge into freezing waters. He presses his hands together, steepling his fingers, before pressing them to his lips and regarding her over them. Allura straightens up, sensing a change in tone.

“What do you know about magic?” he asks with every indication of being completely serious.

She blinks slow and disbelieving at him. “That it doesn’t exist?” she replies, head cocking to one side. “Is my uncle paying you? You really don’t have to be this dedicated to your role.”

He closes his eyes as if praying for strength. And then he is in her face faster than she can draw in breath to scream, crowding her against the high back of the armchair, his eyes wild and feral. Allura’s breath catches in her throat and she can feel her eyes blow wide. How he got around the chair so fast, almost faster than she could turn her head, and into her space she doesn’t know. For one improbable moment she entertains the thought he really might be what he claimed, as impossible as that was.

He tilts his head slowly as he presses forward. A whimper climbs out her throat before she can control it and she fights to not curl up deep into the armchair. Her hand flails out and catches his shoulder, but she can’t find the strength to press him away. She trembles as he leans further in, breath moving across her cheek, along her ear, and she wonders if he’s going to kiss her. Her nails leave little half-moon dents in the muscle of his shoulder.

“You smell like it,” he murmurs into her hair. “You smell like lightning and magic. It’s been a long time since I’ve smelled something like you.”

It’s not until he pulls back, settling back on his haunches where he kneels above her lap, that she can wrestle her breathing into something approximating regularity. She snatches her hand back when she realizes she still has a death grip on his shoulder. He grins at her, slow and crooked and so, so smug.

She has never wanted to smack someone as much as she wants to smack this boy.

“You,” she says slowly, impossibly proud when her voice is even. “Are on thin ice.”

“Am I now?” He asks with infuriating calm. He traces one finger along her jaw and her breath stutters without her permission. Her heart decides that now, of all possible times, is the perfect moment to do a lovely rendition of the drum part of _In The Halls Of The Mountain King_. She tries to wrestle her face into a disapproving frown, but she’s pretty sure she’s wearing an expression of breathless trepidation. “What, precisely, are you going to do about it, witch?”

Allura catches his arm and bucks her hips, twisting all her weight under his and spilling him backwards across the floor. She follows him--pulling his arm behind him and pushing at his hip—when he shouts with alarm, until she’s got him pinned to the floor underneath her, arm twisted up behind his back and locked firm in her grasp. “This,” she says against his ear. “Now. I think we should talk about playing mean pranks.”

He writhes underneath her, muscles flexing in her grasp and she has to twist to keep her seat across his low back. They struggle for a moment like that until he goes limp and huffs out a breathless laugh. “Somewhere Asmodeus is laughing his head off and he has no idea why,” he says to the floor. “Alright, pretty witch, you have a to the count of ten to get off my back—literally!—or we have a problem.”

“Stop calling me a witch,” Allura complains. “It’s rude.”

“One,” he says as if she’d not spoken a word.

Allura tightens her grip on his wrists. “I don’t know what you think you are going to accomplish—”

“Two.”

“I have you pinned! We already—”

“Three”

“Oh, for the love of—”

“Four”

“You are being melodramatic and ridiculous.”

“Five.”

“Just like those horns of yours. They can’t possibly be real.”

“Don’t diss my horns, witchling. Also: six.”

“Stop calling me that!”

“Only being truthful—which, you should appreciate it, is rare for me. Seven.”

“You are really entirely too committed to this role. My uncle must have paid you a bundle.”

“Eight.”

Allura shifts so she’s got her knees firmly locked on either side of hips and presses down against his arm, making him groan a little at the stretch.

“Nine, last chance.”

“Hah!”

“Fine. Ten.” 

At ten he vanishes from under her completely. She has a half second to blink, confused, to find herself staring at the scuffed wood floor rather than a broad barely-clothed back, before she’s bowled over backwards—her shoulders hitting the ground hard enough to drive all the air from her lungs with a heavy _whoop!_ of breath. Her wrists are pulled high above her head and pinned there with one hand, while he smirks down at her, fangs just barely visible. 

“Wait,” she gasps out, breathless and confused. “How?”

He points at himself with his free hand—each finger tipped with a delicate black talon—and smile so sweet it could cause diabetes at a thousand paces. “Demon.”

Allura pulls at her wrists, strains against his hold with every muscle until they fail and she falls back panting for breath. He smiles at her—benevolent, kind, and so, so smug. He runs one talon along the side of her neck where pulse hammers away like a small, trapped thing. “Are you quite done?”

She snarls at him, baring her teeth in a feral snarl and writhing beneath him. He sighs, heavy and disappointed, as if she were a temper-tantrum throwing child. “Get _off_ me,” she demands. “I doubt my uncle would tolerate this.”

He raises one unimpressed eyebrow at her. “Going to run off and hide behind uncle's legs? That's disappointing. You’re the witch,” he says. “Make. Me.”

Allura goes still underneath him, trying to pick apart his words. A small, strange smile curls around his lips, as if he’s given her some sort of important clue that he expects her to use to unlock his mysteries. Assuming he has any mysteries besides being one very obnoxious boy who’s entirely too dedicated to this prank. Perhaps he’s a theatre major.

She pulls against his hold and he rolls his eyes at her. “You aren’t even trying,” he chides. 

“Release me!” She demands, tries to shove every bit of command she possesses into her voice. Difficult to do when she was pinned to the floor like a butterfly to a display board, but her pride demands nothing less.

“Now you _really_ aren’t trying,” he sighs. 

Allura gives a muted scream of frustration—rage and indignation sparking under her skin like lightning going to ground—and jerks against his hold, hips twisting, back arching, trying to fling him off her with a move that her judo instructor would frankly be ecstatic over. This boy just rolls with her, laughing softly under his breath, and presses her wrists more firmly to the ground. She can feel the way her lips peel back to show her teeth as if she were a wolf and she strains against him.

“Very fierce,” he says, openly delighted and mocking. “But that’s not how you will get free.”

Fear is just starting to prickle through her when she hears the cheery bells Coran’s tethered to the shop doors chime and jingle. “Coran!” she screams--panic creeping in like an unwanted guest. “ _Coran!_ ”

She’s gratified at the sudden clatter and thud of running feet. Her uncle bursts into the room, his face as red as his hair. Allura struggles against the boy some more and growls low in the back of her throat when he still doesn’t release her. “There now,” she snarls at him. “Your employer is here. You can drop this ridiculous charade.”

Coran takes in their ludicrous tableau while his eyebrows do an interesting interpretative dance dedicated to her uncle’s mounting confusion. “And just what,” he says slowly and with careful enunciation. “Did I say about speaking Latin around the books?”

“Coran!” Allura howls. “Now is not the time to be continuing this stupid joke!”

Her uncle splutters while the boy pinning her to the ground eyes him with slow recognition creeping across his face. “Coran? Now there is a mundane name, Cenodoxus.”

“Eligos,” Coran sighs. "Would be too much to hope that you would simply forget this?”

The boy smiles, wild and feral and with far more teeth than should fit inside a human mouth. Something very close to fear trickles down Allura’s spine. “It would,” he agrees as sweet as crystalizing honey. “I was summoned, Cenodoxus, you know how that goes.”

“I do,” Coran sighs. “It never ceases to amaze me how much of a stickler for rules you can be.”

“Well,” the boy says, diffident and dismissive all at once. “There’s so much paperwork when I ignore them, and then Asmodeus gets on my case and gets The Look, you know the one.” He moves his hand over his face and then pulls an impossible flat face. “And I’d rather avoid that.”

“Indeed,” Coran agrees, and they consider each other for a long, silent moment while the air of bookshop moves heavy and odd between them.

“Um,” Allura says, not a little petulant. “This is all well and good—except for the part where it _absolutely_ isn’t—but could you kindly get off me?”

That gets the boy to turn back to her, head cocking, horns glittering queerly in the normally cheerful light of the bookstore. “Is that a wish?”

“Eligos,” Coran says in the first warning, hostile tone that Allura has ever heard him use.

“I go by Lance these days,” he says, teeth very sharp and very bright in his wide smile. “And it’s a fair question.”

“She didn’t know,” her uncle argues, low and urgent. “She’s never known.”

“Known what?” Allura barks at the both of them. She twists in his grasp, fingers finding the delicate tendons in his wrist where he keeps her arms pinned high above her head and digging in, sharp and vicious.

He releases easily, laughing as he pulls away from her. “I am not inclined to be _nice_ ,” he says, and his eyes glow a brilliant Bunsen-burner blue. “But I’ll do you a favor,” and his grin is a wicked thing. “As a gift for all the fun you used to be.”

Allura pulls herself up to sitting and shivers despite herself at the way her uncle’s eyes flash behind his glasses. But his voice is calm as a winter pond. “Freely given and freely offered?” He asks.

“I’m not fae!” the boy laughs. There is a moment again of some unspoken conversation between them and the boy leans back on his hands and sighs. “Fine, fine. Freely given and freely offered. I won’t take a wish from her until she understands what it means. I’ll play nice.”

“Nice once used to mean ‘foolish’ or ‘stupid’,” Coran says idly while his gaze locks onto this boy like the targeting laser of some terrible weapon. “So, I have to wonder who you are playing for a fool here.”

“Not you, Cenodoxus,” and Allura has to blink because suddenly he’s on his feet in one swift movement that makes her think of flick-knives and spring-loaded traps—sudden, sharp, and so, so deadly. Lance drapes himself over her uncle like a shawl made of half-naked boy. “Never you.”

Coran regards him over the rims of his glasses and then sighs heavily. “I suppose you will be here a while then,” he says nonsensically. “I’ll have change the wards.”

“Is that what I felt?” Lance asks, still spilled across her uncle without an ounce of shame in him. “I did wonder.”

“And there is your famous concern for the egos of will-workers,” her uncle says drily. “We’re sensitive you know.”

Lance laughs and Allura is startled at its husky sound. She’d expected something high and chiming, like bells or birdsong, not this rasping cough of noise. “Not that sensitive,” he says. “I remember the way you drove me back without even a flicker of remorse.”

“You were trying to eat my soul, Eligos,” Coran says and his voice is the Sahara. 

“Yes, well,” Lance says as if the matter were no more than a mere difference of opinion on the shade of paint. “I am a demon. Also, I go by Lance. If you would.”

“Lance,” her uncle says, so flat his voice could be used as a level. “That’s …”

“Hysterical, right?” he grins, broad and delighted. “It’s such a stupid pun on so many levels that I love it.”

“You would,” her uncle grumbles. “So, she summoned you.”

“Without a by your leave or a circle or salt or even a nice candle!” Lance chirps and swirls away to pull Allura to her feet with both hands. He presses her hands, caught between his like startled doves, to his chest and beams at her. “It was so unusual I had to come right away!”

“Of course, you did.” Coran removes his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose slowly, the way he did when Allura had accidentally sorted fifty alchemy books in with the books on home brewing. (In her defense, the table of contents between the two were remarkably similar.) “The fact that a witch with no training and enough power to make herself heard without any foci had nothing to do with it.”

Lance tucks a stray lock of hair behind Allura’s ear and she finds herself transfixed by his sharp, white smile and brilliant eyes. Like a mouse staring at an exotic snake, she thinks to herself, just like a mouse. “Nothing at all,” Lance murmurs. His hands are very warm against her skin. “Not a thing.”

It’s the greatest act of willpower that Allura has ever done, but she pulls herself out his grasp and goes to stand next to her uncle. If she stumbles a little bit, legs shaky as a newborn fawn’s, neither of them say anything. “You two cannot possibly be serious,” she says. She’ll be embarrassed about the way a plea works itself through her tone later. “This is a prank. A joke.”

“Only as much as all life itself is a joke of the Almighty’s,” Lance says, flinging his hands out wide. “But I don’t think you will find that reassuring.”

“I did tell you not speak Latin around the books,” Coran sighs. “I suppose I should have explained myself a little bit better.”

“But magic isn’t _real_ ,” she wails. “It’s just, just … tricks of light and mirrors and stupid people who want to believe cards and star charts have more control over their lives than they do! It’s not real!”

The boy shrugs, apparently entirely unconcerned with her little mental breakdown. “For most people, perhaps not, for you? For your bloodline? It’s quite real. Congratulations, daughter of Gullveig, the seidr runs through your blood like the richest of wines.”

Allura’s quite sure that having wine run through one’s blood would be more than a little bit of a problem, but that’s not the important thing here. The important thing was the straight delivery of that line, the way her uncle’s shoulders cave inward, the way a chill trips its way down her spine. Little things, tiny things, simple things that told her this was almost certainly the truth. At least as far as this pair of lunatics saw it. She crosses her arms over her chest and stomps away from them—mind racing furiously. With a wordless shout of frustration she tosses her arms up in the air and stomps back to where the pair of them stare at her, silent and bemused.

Before she can give herself time to think about, Allura reaches out and grabs one black and silver horn and yanks on it hard enough to tilt the boy’s head around. “This. I. This cannot,” she splutters in incoherent confusion before running her fingers along the curve of one horn down to where it meets his head and then back up. “This is real.”

“As real as your arms,” he retorts, with his lips curling up and over his fangs in silent threat. “Shall I yank on your arms and see if they twist off as well?”

“Eligos,” Coran murmurs in mild rebuke.

“Lance,” he snaps in reply before pulling his horns from Allura’s numb grasp. “Well,” he continues in a surprisingly prim tone even as he catches her fluttering fingers in one cool hand. “Now that she knows what she is, we can get down to business.”

Coran makes a disgusted noise low in his throat. “You know that we cannot.” He waves a hand at Allura’s stunned expression and the way that she allows Lance to hold her hand loose and unresisting. “She’s in shock.”

Lance rolls his eyes expressively before tugging on Allura’s wrist, making her stumble forward into the ease grasp of his arms. He cocks his head to the side as he eyes her, sweeping from head to toe in a lazy sweep and even lazier smile. “Are you in shock, Princess?” He asks, something in his tone prodding at her pride like red-hot pokers. “Are you?”

She bares her teeth at him. “You wish.”

He swings her out and the spins her an easy circle before dipping her low and sweet in his arms, his smile is an insolent, infuriating thing. Everything about him is designed to drive her insane and frothing with fury, but some shameless part of her is charmed— _charmed!_ \-- by his antics. “Excellent,” he says, so close that she can feel his steady breath across her lips. “Lets have a little wager then, shall we? One day, I think, if you can go one day without asking for my help I will let you go, free and clear. If you can’t,” he croons as he swings her back up to standing. “Then your delicious soul is mine for the rest of eternity. How is that?”

She tugs herself out his grasp—forces herself to ignore how warm, warm, warm his hands are against her skin—and sneers at him. “Done. There is nothing I will ever ask you for. Nothing at all.”

Her uncle slaps a hand to his forehead and stutters out a string of impressively foul curses while the wicked grin on Lance’s face curves into something deadly in its charm. “Nothing?” he repeats in a low tone that pulls at things low in her belly that she prefers to ignore. “Are you certain?”

Allura snatches her arms back from his grasp and glowers at him. “Perfectly.”

Lance claps his hands together and beams at her, as innocent and delighted as kittens in a sunbeam. She is immediately and completely suspicious. “Excellent!” he crows before point at her uncle. “You heard, yes? Heard and witnessed!”

Coran sighs. “We should discuss delivery time tables, Eligos.”

“Lance!” the boy chirps again. “And you doubt so much! She might win our little wager.”

Both of them glower at him—though for radically different ideas, she’s sure. Allura looks down her nose at him--or tries at least, he's infuriatingly tall. “I don’t even know what you can possibly offer me.”

Lance catches her hand and presses a kiss to her knuckles before rolling his eyes up at her where he dips low over her hand. “Everything, Princess,” he says in a low, throaty rumble. Something pitiful and traitorous curls low in her belly at that thrumming sound. “I can give you everything.”

She sneers at him silently and tugs at her hand while her uncle groans over the pair of them. “Standard rules of delivery apply,” Coran says with a surprisingly serious rumble to his tone. “You have to—”

“Wait until natural causes of death,” Lance agrees with a huffy sigh and waves one hand negligently. He lets Allura pull her hand back with a small, secret smile—as if just by holding her hand he knew something about herself she didn’t. “Yes, yes, of course.” 

Allura rubs her knuckles against her sternum and glowers, trying to drag up memories of her mother’s disapproving frown. “Delivery of what, precisely?”

Her uncle swears profusely and with a greater creative breadth than she had, quite frankly, ever expected of him. Lance’s smile, however, grows from something small and secretive to a wide, terrifying grin of utter delight. “Well, your soul, of course.”

Allura takes a full step back from him and looks him up and down—she can only imagine expression her face is making. “That’s not at all possible. I would have to have a soul, for starters, and those aren’t any more real than magic is.”

“The disbelief of a non-believer,” Lance chirps with every indication of absolute relish. “It continues to be such a delight. The first time they see the lake of fire.” He makes a little gesture with his fingers. “Lovely.”

“Elig—Lance,” at Lance’s sudden, fire-storm glare, Coran corrects himself hastily. “As you said, she might win your wager, and terms aren’t set yet.”

Lance runs one black-tipped talon back and forth across his lips as he considers Allura in a manner she feels reminiscent of a cat regarding a caged and oblivious bird. “Indeed. And she gave me such a lovely, simple challenge. One day, one dance of the sun and the moon through the sky, for me to woo her into asking something of me.”

“I won’t,” Allura snaps.

His smile is broad and brilliant and just condescending enough around the edges to drive a sliver of apprehension through her.

“Common courtesies do not count,” Coran says, ticking the amendment off on one finger.

“Of course,” Lance agrees easily—so easily they both frown at him. “I wouldn’t want to win on a technicality.” Allura blinks and shivers when he vanishes, only to reappear behind her. His breath a gentle puff of air along her neck. “A soul like this should be a challenge—something to be savored.”

“No manipulation of time,” Coran continues with every indication of ignoring Lance’s antics. 

“Boo,” Lance groans and Allura shudders—holding still as he drops his arms over her shoulders, holding her in the easy circle of his arms. Something deep in the instinctive parts of her mind whisper that she should be still, still, still. The deep, lizard parts of her brain hiss that there's a predator present and now is time to be _still_. “That’s no fun.”

“No manipulation of her perceptions,” Coran finishes. “She has to be aware of what she is asking for when she asks.”

Lance slides away from her, a ghost across her skin and every piece of her is alight with a subtle fire. “Agreed.” He taps a talon to her lips. “Are we agreed, witchling?”

“Stop calling me that,” she says and her voice fails her—comes out a breathy plea rather than the demand she intends. Allura clears her throat and tries to find the tempered steel of her confidence. “We are agreed.”

His answering grin is wide and blinding and so, so smug. " _Excellent_."


	2. been around many a long year (man of wealth and taste)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Oh hey, I found a plot.

“Well,” Coran sighs as he hands her a cup of cocoa. “Next time I tell you to avoid speaking Latin around the books, I trust that you will actually listen to me? I have reasons behind my requests, you know!”

Allura grimaces as she accepts the cup, curling around it as he scowls with his rebuke. 

“It just seemed so ridiculous!” She protests, waving one hand at the shadowed bookshelves. Her uncle’s shop has never seemed ominous before, but now the dark recesses and gentle hush of the closed shop press in close around her, making her shiver. “It _seems_ ridiculous,” she corrects. “If there’s actually magic in the world, wouldn’t it be all over the news?” She waves a hand. “All over social media? People are … always … talking … about…. Hm.”

Her uncle watches her with one eyebrow arched in distinct amusement. “Do go on.”

“But none of that is _real_ ,” she protests, curling tighter around her mug. When Coran laughs at her softly she stares hard at the steaming cocoa like it will help her find a way to make sense of the way her uncle is, ever so gently, upending her entire worldview. 

Coran twirls his moustache around one finger as he settles into his own chair. “Well, a wise man once said: ‘any sufficiently advanced technology works just like magic,’ and I have found the reverse to be equally enlightening.”

Allura makes a face. “Did you seriously just quote Clarke’s Third Law at me to explain the idea of magic?”

That gets her a wide grin. “Did it help?”

“Not even remotely,” Allura snipes back. “Please tell me little bits of crystal and dream catchers don’t actually work. I don’t think my heart could take it.”

He sighs and holds out a hand, Allura reaches out and grabs his back, pressing hard just to feel something steady. “We should have perhaps told you earlier,” he muses. “But your father wanted you to have a normal life, not one lived half in shadows and old mysteries.”

“That’s both melodramatic and ominous,” Allura sighs.

Coran rubs a thumb over her knuckles. “Well,” he says with an eyebrow slowly arching. “You did manage to accidently summon a major demon with nothing more than half an incantation, a little mood lighting, and an ungodly amount of untrained talent. I think we are well within our rights to start the obligatory dramatic training montage.”

She makes a face at him. “I regret every day that I bought you that boxset of _Buffy_. I am going to impound them for the good of my sanity.”

He laughs like an asshole and pats her hand. “We should start you training,” he says with far more glee than she thinks the situation really merits. He bounces up, full of cheerful energy, and chirps: “Here, I have some reading for you to do!”

“If it’s anything by Raven Moonwhatshername or anyone else with questionable choices in pseudonyms, I am throwing those books right at your head, and I’ll remind you that I’m the star pitcher for my college softball team,” she calls after him. Coran flaps a hand at her and she settles into her chair grumbling.

She’s just about finished her cocoa when her uncle all but skips back into the room and dumps a pile of books on her lap. Allura flips through them with growing confusion. “ _The Golden Bough_ , _The Poetic Eddas_ , Edith Hamilton’s _Greek Mythology_ ,” she reads aloud. She blinks at Coran who beams back at her as he drops into his own armchair with no regard for its poor seat springs. “Am I learning to be a witch or minoring in folk stories and mythology?”

“You should learn your roots,” he says primly. “Learn to walk before you try to run.”

“I thought I summoned a major demon on nothing but raw power,” she asks with as much snide dismissiveness as she can pack into her tone, which is quite a bit, thank you.

Coran sighs, “Yes, that is a bit like throwing yourself off the top of a building and hoping you learn to fly on the way down. Let’s not do that again.” He nudges one of the books. “These are to give you an idea of the world beneath the mask.”

“Veil,” Allura interjects.

“I beg your pardon?”

Allura picks up one of the heavy mythology texts and flips through it idly. “Most of the gaming systems that deal in urban magic call it pulling back the veil.” She makes a little pulling gesture. “The idea being that once one is initiated the veil over one’s eyes is pulled back.”

“Pulling back the veil,” her uncle repeats as if he’s tasting the words. He claps his hands together, pleased and grinning. “Yes! I like that, clever girl,” he praises. “Even without any training you have a natural understanding of things.”

Allura puts her cup down with a heavy thunk of ceramic on wood and glares at her uncle. “I understand precisely none of this,” she says coldly. “I’m not convinced yet that this isn’t an elaborate prank.”

Coran raises an eyebrow at her. “Even the part where Eligos disappeared in a puff a logic and left a very nice circle of ash and char on my good hardwood floors? You are going to scrub that out tomorrow morning, by the way.”

“You cannot be serious,” she protests. He gives a prim look and says nothing. “Even if I accept that this Eligos is, in fact, a demon there’s no reason that _I_ should be the one to clean up after his mess.”

“It’ll be your first lesson in consequences,” he says in a prissy tone that would make any governess proud.

She makes a face. “Maybe I should just have Eligos clean up his mess.”

“You will do no such thing,” Coran says severely. “Even if you cannot appreciate the gravity of this situation trust that I would never lead you astray in this. You will not risk your immortal soul for something as trivial as clean floors.”

Allura shrinks back into her chair, thoroughly cowed as Coran thunders at her. “It was a joke,” she says in a small voice. “I’m sorry.”

Coran looks at her for a long time with an expression she cannot read before he sighs. “We did you no favors by keeping you this sheltered for so long.” He shakes his head. “No favors at all. I should have foreseen that you would do something like this. Ah, well,” he says with a great heaving breath that sets the edges of his mustache fluttering. “At least you called up Eligos. You could have summoned up something much worse. Or caught the attention of far more evil powers.”

She can’t help the way her eyebrow tries to hike itself right up into her hairline. “I thought demons were, by definition, the evilest thing out there? Sort of the primordial evil and all that.”

Coran barks out a little laugh that is the bitterest thing she’s ever heard from him in her entire life. The harsh, grating sound sends an icy shiver down her spine. He waves towards the pile of books. “Demons have hardly cornered the market on evil, nor are they the only ones with a taste for souls. I’ve set your reading list for a reason,” he says with a seriousness that she’s only ever associated with him doing business taxes—a process that involves a great deal of swearing—his face set in grim lines. “I should have you read the Torah and the Koran while I’m at it. Expand your idea of demons a little bit.”

Allura gathers the books into her arms and hunches over them. “I think this is quite enough to be getting on with,” she says with only a little bit of a whine to her voice. “I’m supposed to be on summer break.”

“Consider break cancelled,” he says. He relents, a little bit, under her plaintive stare. “Oh, it's not as bad as all that. I rather doubt you’ll find the reading onerous given your eclectic tastes. Besides, you’ll quite like learning how to summon fire.”

She can’t help the way she clutches the books to her chest and her eyes go wide. “I can learn to summon _fire_ ,” she breathes. “Like a pyrokinetic?”

Coran looks at her for a long while before huffing a rueful little laugh. “I shouldn’t have told you that,” he says more to himself. “Go to bed, you little pyromaniac. It’s late and you’ve created enough trouble for yourself for one evening.”

“I’m not a pyromaniac,” she defends, insulted.

“Allura, darling niece,” Coran says with one eyebrow slowly arching. “You nearly burned down your treehouse when you were eight playing with your father’s lighter.”

“That was one time!”

“You set a bonfire so large the coastguard was called out to investigate.”

“Overly cautious, jumped up little man just wanted a promotion,” she says with a sniff.

“You spent three weeks arguing with your RA until they relented and allowed you to have candles in your dorm and then you nearly burned it down when you left them burning,” Coran continues with no indication he’s heard a single word of her defenses. “You are a menace.”

“I’m going to bed,” she tells her uncle coolly. “If I’m going to be maligned like this.”

“Sleep sweet, Princess,” Coran says, and he looks old and tired in ways that twist Allura’s heart. She presses a kiss to his cheek and he smiles at her. “It’ll work itself out,” he says. “Never you worry.”

She smiles at him. “I never do with you here.”

He pats her hand and smiles at her. Allura worries over that small, sad smile as she climbs the narrow stairs up to the little flat Coran’s let her rent for a quarter of the going price. It’s tiny, the floorboards creak alarmingly, and the kitchen stove is older than sin, but it's hers. She drops the books on her bed and then neatly organizes them in order of general material to specific topic before stacking them on her little nightstand. 

Allura tucks _The Golden Bough_ under one arm and tugs open her bedroom window. It takes a little bit of acrobatics and creative twisting, but she manages to get out onto the roof without dropping herself or her book off the edge. The stars are nothing more than distant pinpricks in the sky, but the moon sits fat and full and glowing bright enough that she can read if she squints.

A hand tipped with delicate black talons carefully removes the book from her grasp for the second time in the evening and she huffs at Eligos. He clicks his tongue at her. “Reading in the dark is bad for your eyes, witchling.”

She makes a grab for her book and he vanishes it right out of existence with pointed look. “Why do you care about my eyes,” she asks grumpily. “I thought it was only my soul you were interested in.”

“True,” he says, drawling the word obnoxiously. “But if I let you damage yourself, Cenodoxus will bitch my ears right off and I got enough of that throughout the entirety of the 80s, I have no need for a repeat. And besides, your eyes are so lovely it would be a shame for you to damage them.”

Allura isn’t sure where to start with any of his twisting words—threat, explanation, and flirtation all tangled together—so she ignores him entirely while she tries to find solid ground. She draws her knees up to her chest and presses her cheek against them. She watches as he slouches into an easy cross-legged seat next to her. “You knew him when he was a teenager?”

“The gothiest little goth you ever did see,” Eligos says with a grin. “Dyed all that red hair black and wore entirely too much eyeliner. It was a _joy_.”

Allura tries to imagine it and fails. Her imagination just isn’t up to the task. “I don’t believe you,” she says to his delighted laughter. “If you’re going to lie, at least make it a believable one.”

He tilts his head with a slow grin creeping across his face. He’s something caught between the frat boys at her college who drape themselves all over their porches trying to catch her attention, Peter Pan and something fae and feral. The long, lean lines of him pared down to frightening sharpness that’s mirrored in his sharp, dainty fangs and vicious gaze. She shivers, a little, as he studies her.

“And what sort of believable lie would you like me to tell you, witchling?” He asks, voice more thoughtful than seductive.

Allura squints at him, trying to work out his expression in the night. Eligos’ horns catch the moonlight queerly and, before she quite knows what she’s doing, she reaches out to trace one with the tip of her finger. “That is an entirely too obvious trap,” she says softly as her finger catches the ridges of the curling horn and he tips his head ever so slightly into the touch. “You’ll have to work harder than that.”

Eligos’ eyes gleam in the darkness, reflective like a cat’s and his grin has the same predatory, feline edge. “Do you want me to?” He purrs. “Work harder, that is? One would think that a sensible mortal would want me to give up, go away, leave their immortal soul in peace.”

There’s something to still of the night, heavy with humidity and the aftermath of the storm, lit up by the moon so bright it seems unreal. “I don’t know,” she says honestly, still tracing Eligos’ horns with lazy fingers—it’s smooth and cool to the touch, so cold in fact that condensation is slowly forming along them. “I’m half convinced that I’ll wake up any moment now and swear never to drink any of my uncle’s specially blended teas ever again.”

“He still dabbles with that?” Eligos laughs. “That is strangely _adorable_. Also stop that.”

Allura snatches back her hand, flush rocketing up her face as she realizes she’s been idly stroking his horns as if he were a pet. “I’m, I. Uh,” she stutters, mortified. “I’m so sorry.”

“Not that,” he says and snags her hand, drawing it back to his horns. “Stop thinking of me as Eligos. My name is Lance. It’s rude to refuse to call people by the names they prefer.”

He says this so primly, with such Victorian offense, that Allura automatically curls her hand around his horn at the base and blinks at him. “I’m sorry,” she repeats, and then adds after a little thought: “Lance. I’m sorry, Lance.”

The smile he turns on her has entirely too many sharp teeth to be reassuring, but she finds her pulse fluttering anyway. “Thank you,” he says, sweet and sincere. “The other name,” his gaze goes dark and distant. “It has some unpleasant associations now. Ones I’d rather forget; I’d rather forget the entire name.”

“Well,” she says thoughtfully, and gives up any relationship she might have with the concept of shame and goes back to learning the shape of his horns, fingers exploring where their base meets his skull. “You have roughly several million books to destroy if you want the world to forget along with you.”

Lance gapes at her with offense written across every line of his body. “I could _never_ ,” he gasps out. “I might be a demon but I’m not a _philistine!_ ”

It’s such an incongruous thing—the outrage over potentially defacing millions of books from a being that had, if the books were to be believed, had lead millions to their doom—that Allura sputters out a little laugh and promptly presses her hand to her mouth to stop herself. He gives her a deeply betrayed look. She blinks at him, biting her lips so hard she can feel them go white, and sort of hiccups out a little giggle despite her best efforts. He rolls his eyes so hard his entire body moves with it and that’s the moment she just loses it—starts to laugh so hard she has to press her face to her knees to try to keep herself quiet.

“Rude, witchling,” he chides but she doesn’t think he sounds angry.

Her laughter has a sharp, nearly hysterical edge to them, and he tentatively smooths a hand down her spine like she might snap his hand off at the wrist, or just completely shatter. Allura drags in a breath, and then another, and another until she’s dragged herself into some sort of semblance of calm. She keeps her face pressed to her knees as embarrassment and guilty pleasure with the way his hand moves over her back tangle together in her belly, pulling at things low and dangerous.

“Why did you come?” She asks after a while. She props her chin on her knees and watches the silent street rather than look at him.

“Well,” he says in a teasing tone. “There was this little summoning spell, you might have noticed i— _urk_ ”

Allura glares at him as he rubs his ribs where she’s elbowed him hard enough that, if he were mortal, would leave a glorious bruise. Lance smiles at her, fangs glinting in the moonlight. There’s a million subtle things about him, if she lets herself be romantic and ridiculous, that screams inhuman—not just the horns or the reflective eyes or the way his fingers are each tipped with a black talon sharp as a cutting word, but in the way he moves just a little too smoothly to be real, the casual grace even in his laziest of gestures. 

“You really don’t lie very well,” she tells him. “For a demon.”

The grin she gets is quick and sly. “They do say the best way to lie is with a bit of truth,” he waves a finger in the air, “have to get you to trust me with little truths before you’ll believe the big lie.”

Allura narrows her eyes. “I’m pretty sure it works almost exactly in opposite,” she says. “You lure them in with the small lies that make swallowing the big lie easier.”

“Oh humans,” he sighs with smug glee. “You never cease to amaze me at how well you do our job better than I could ever hope. Really, I should just retire.”

She has the impression that she’s being mocked and refuses to dignify that with a response. Instead she pokes him, hard, in the side. “You still haven’t answered my question,” she tells him primly. “Don’t think I didn’t notice that.”

He tucks a lock of her hair behind her ear—a quick, familiar gesture that leaves her stunned and stuttering for a moment. “Could I not just want the pleasure of your company for an evening? The moon is beautiful and its light in your hair is an artist’s dream.”

“Are you flirting?” She asks, completely baffled by the idea. He prompts his elbow on his knee and rests his chin on one fist, grinning at her like a lazy cat with a wounded bird. Something about his smug, sly expression rankles her, digs underneath her skin and makes her spiteful. “Because I would think a centuries old demon would have better lines.”

He gasps in mock offense. “I craft you poetry and you accuse me of using lines.”

She can’t help the way she sputters out a choked and disbelieving laugh. “Poetry, really?”

He shrugs a shoulder, sulky and pouting—which is honestly a fascinating thing on a supposedly ancient being of evil and deceit—and shoots her a sly look after a moment. “I could write you poetry, if you would like? Recite lines from Neruda or twist the psalms to speak to the subtle beauty of your smile or the lightning strike tenor of your voice.”

“I’d rather you didn’t,” she tells him seriously, ignoring the way a blush tries to climb up her face at his crooning tone. 

“Is that a request,” he asks with a curious head tilt.

“No,” she says and makes a face at him. “Though do you really want to win with a cheap trick like annoying me into asking you to stop asking like a fuckboy? Seems a little petty, even for a demon.”

He blinks. “What’s a fuckboy?”

“Oh my god,” she moans, pressing her face into her knees. “Go on tinder and pretend to be a girl for, like, half an hour. You’ll learn.”

Lance pokes her cheek. “How can you go on a tinder? It’s a thing humans use to start fires, no?”

“Oh my god,” she repeats, pressing her face harder into knees. “I am so not explaining any of this to you. I’m pretty sure that I’ll end up accidentally damning someone’s immortal soul to hell and I don’t need that kind of guilt.”

“No, no,” he says, poking her again. “Now you must tell me! Allura,” he whines. “I’m _curious_ you can’t just leave me to waste away in this ignorance.”

She turns to look at him and he’s got on the most dramatic pleading expression, all big puppy dog eyes and trembling lips, and it’s beyond ridiculous. Allura reaches out and flicks his nose before she really registers what she’s done. He goes cross-eyed to follow the movement. She’s struck by the odd, unrealness of the entire evening—sitting on the roof of her little flat with a creature that purports to be a demon after being told she’s a witch—and she can’t help the bemused smile slowly grows until she can feel her dimples.

“Are you telling me that a being of eldritch magic and evil can’t figure out a smartphone app on his own?” she asks as he pouts at her. “I thought you lot were supposed to be cleverer than humans.”

He rolls his eyes expressively, his entire body moving the expression, and waggles his fingers at her. “Indulge me,” he tells her, “it’s been decades since I’ve been in this realm. Last time I materialized here humans had just theorized the possibility of quantum computing and were very excited about the collective behavior of electrons in a two-dimensional system,” he pauses for a moment, oddly thoughtful, before adding, “and apparently believed in the saving power of excessive amounts of hairspray.”

Allura opens her mouth, stares at him for a moment, and then closes it. Lance cocks his head to the side, moonlight glinting off the chains around his neck and playing along the tips of his curling horns, he almost looks innocent—or at least like he’s not actively trying to mock her. 

“Hairspray,” she repeats dumbly.

“Have you seen pictures of the 80s?” He asks and draws his hands up and down over his head like he’s putting on a ridiculously tall top hat or miming an impenetrable cylinder, Allura isn’t quite sure. “If your hair wasn’t sticking out at least three inches from your head at all times then you were a failure to the human race and brought shame down upon your family and your cow.”

“Upon your cow,” she repeats again because apparently he doesn’t know what a smartphone is but has managed to watch _Mulan_. She has questions. “You’ve watched _Mulan_.”

“I watched what now?” He asks, blinking. Allura can’t tell if he’s serious or messing with her. She narrows her eyes at him and stares at him hard as if she could reach inside his head and pull out all his secrets. He flicks her between the eyes with one dark talon. “Careful, witchling,” he says. “Some secrets are meant to be kept.”

She pulls a face before she can stop herself, her nose scrunching up in indignation, and she swats at him while he chuckles. “Just what are you doing out here,” she asks again, not because she really expects any sort of answer, but out sheer desperate need to give voice to her frustration. “Are you here just to annoy me until I beg you to leave?”

He leans back on his hands and considers her for a long moment before shrugging. “I’m curious,” he says, his voice oddly flat. “I’ve not been summoned out of Assiya in quite some time, and now there’s this girl calling my name with nothing more than a book written by a dead man who couldn’t find his own ass with a flashlight and a detailed map, some mood lighting, and sheer will power,” he gives a little shrug and repeats: “I’m curious.”

Allura’s not sure what she’s supposed to do with this sudden confession. It feels to raw to approach directly, too much like an admission she’s not supposed to hear, and she wonders if he even meant to say it. She watches him from the corner of her eyes and he doesn’t look at her, studying the still street below them instead. 

“What exactly are you curious about,” she asks after a while, caving despite her better instincts. “Me or how the world has changed?”

Lance’s gaze flicks to her, quick and furtive. “Both, either,” he shrugs again. “Assiya does not change, days slide into each other in a long, endless blur of tedium.”

That honestly sounded significantly worse than the normal depictions of hell, and he coughs out a bitter little laugh when she says so. She blinks when he materializes _The Golden Bough_ between his spread hands, the book hanging in thin air as he frowns at it contemplatively. 

“Cenodoxus gave you this as homework?” he says, the attempt to divert the conversation so obvious she can’t help but pity him a little.

“He prefers to be called Coran,” she says, echoing his prim tone from earlier and he laughs softly under his breath. She holds a hand for her book back and scowls when it blinks into existence over her spread palm. “Well,” Allura huffs. “That’s one way of proving your point.”

“Which point is that, witchling,” he asks. “I’ve made several thus far.”

“The bit about magic existing,” she says, hands curling around the edge of the book. It settles into her hands, heavy and reassuring. She runs her hands over it, not really expecting wires but, well, perhaps hoping for them. She sighs when she finds none. “The entire thing is unsettling.”

He laughs, rueful and oddly sympathetic. “Poor witchling, had your entire world turned inside out?”

She squints at him. “Don’t mock me,” she warns, “I don’t know how, but I will make you regret it.”

“Of course not,” he says with a little salute. “I want you to like me, remember?”

“What do demons even _do_ with the souls they’ve won?” she asks. “Seems incredibly foolish to give your soul away to something that’s going to torment it for the rest of eternity.”

“I see heaven still has the better public relations department,” Lance sighs. “We’re not going to torment your soul for the rest of eternity,” he says, seemingly bored and disinterested in the question, but his mouth pulls down around the corners as if he’s bitten into something unexpectedly bitter. “Your soul joins the Fallen, or goes into a reincarnation cycle, kinda depends.”

“On what?” 

“What?” he repeats, clearly thrown.

“What decides if a soul goes into a reincarnation cycle or joins the Fallen,” she frowns. “What is the Fallen anyway? Sounds like the name of a band that takes themselves entirely too seriously.”

Lance chokes on a laugh, turning faintly red and sputtering. “Ah,” he coughs out, “well, you aren’t wrong on taking themselves too seriously.” He matches her thoughtful expression, staring out at the queerly night, as if all the birds and insects knew a terrible predator lurks in their woods and dare not make a sound. “The Fallen are the throngs of Hell that will face Heaven’s army on Judgement Day,” he shrugs, suddenly dismissive. “Or so the story goes, so far? Souls are just a way to keep score.”

Allura stares at him. “ _Keep score_.”

“Yep,” he gives her an unpleasant smile tinged with nameless anger that she can’t place. “Charming, isn’t it?”

“That’s,” her voice trails off as she tries to find the words to describe the insult and vague horror. She frowns at the silent street below them. “How do I know you are telling the truth?”

“You don’t,” he says flatly. “And demons always lie, right?”

Allura stares at him for a long moment wondering at that bitterness. She cocks her head. “So like politicians then?”

The sound that sputters out of him is the bastard lovechild of laugh and an indignant squawk. He stares at her for a long, still moment before shaking his head and point through her window. “Go to sleep, witchling, you’re no longer making sense.”

“Are you certain,” she asks with a theatrical head tilt. “Politicians are all known to be dishonest, they covet, well, _everything_ and they corrupt everything that they touch.”

“They are also a purely human invention,” he says with an indignant little sniff. 

She grins at him, smug now that she’s scored a hit against him and that wall of an ego, and he pokes her, lightly, with one talon. “And how many politicians’ souls have you collected,” she asks as he rolls his eyes at her, “over the centuries?”

“Very few,” he tells her primly. “They are boring and tedious and _easy_. There’s no glory In claiming one.” Lance shrugs, the gesture oddly fluid and she’s caught at the way the muscles move under his skin. “I prefer to go after things that are a bit more of a challenge.”

Allura gives him an infinitely bland look. “The souls of college girls, for example.”

“Those were once quite rare,” he says with a sly little smile. He reaches out and threads a lock of her hair through his fingers, and she’s surprised with herself that she lets him. “But, no, the soul a witch has always been a rare and precious thing.”

This is a line of flattery so absurd that she can’t help the snort of disbelief. He blinks at her. “I was pretty sure the entire point of being a witch was consorting with ‘dark powers’ and the like,” she says with finger quotes. “I did read _The Crucible_ in high school.”

Lance leans back on his hands and laughs softly. “As long as the world has turned has it hated women who stood free and unfettered,” he says, and his eyes are distant, like he’s seeing a memory. “The entire point of being a witch, as near as I can tell, is to do what one likes, when one likes, and suffer no fools. No, witchling, you will not find that many witches among the Fallen,” he says with a sigh. “They are often too clever, or too stubborn, for that.”

“You sound like you know a few,” she says, a strange surge of irritation burning through her veins. 

“Jealous?” He asks, and she resists the urge to stick her tongue out at him. His face makes a complicated expression and he tugs on an errant lock of her hair. “Go to sleep witchling.”

Allura is about to complain—what, precisely, about she isn’t sure—when he vanishes into thin air, the moonlight not even shivering at his sudden absence. She makes disgusted noise. “You can’t get out of conversations you don’t like by disappearing,” she says to the empty air and then promptly feels very foolish. 

The humid night air, naturally, says nothing in response.

She wiggles back through her bedroom window, feeling not unlike a child sent to bed so the adults can talk and resents it. Tossing _The Golden Bough_ on her bed and goes through her evening routine in a decided sulk that she can’t quite shake. She’s not sure why she’s feeling petulant and snubbed, but she does.

Flopping across her bed Allura decides to give into the bad mood and props open the book against her pillow. She skims through descriptions of fertility rituals, human sacrifice and the dying god—also ways so young and desperately beautiful—until her eyes burn and sleep steals over her, soft and incessant. 

///

Allura expects her dreams to be odd and disjointed, always a hazard when she reads before bed, but they are instead vivid and surprisingly lucid—so immediate and visceral she expects a trick. Only she knows herself to be dreaming because nowhere in the world are there literally rivers of fire lazily flowing over a cracked and blackened landscape.

“Hell?” She asks, not bothering to turn around. “Not exactly welcoming.”

“It’s merely a space shaped by your cognition,” Lance says. When she turns to shoot him a look he gives her a little aborted shrug. “Are you a secret Catholic? This is more their thing,” he waves a hand at the river of fire that burbles merrily along, “the brimstone and wails of the damned.”

Allura blinks and turns back to the desolate terrain with a faint frown. The world ripples around them like the surface of a still pool disturbed by rain before resolving once again into bleak and bleached ruins scattered among basalt rock and shifting sand. Allura huffs. Drawing in a deep breath she closes her eyes and thinks of ice, howling winds, and endless snow. 

As snowflakes catch on her lashes she shoots Lance a smug grin, he inclines his horns towards her. “Well done, witchling,” he praises. “Very Nordic.”

Catching the fat and lazy flurries of snow as they fall in her hands, she continues to grin. “I like snow,” she tells him. “I like the cold.”

Lance makes a non-committal sound in the back of his throat. She watches as he tips his head the side, shaking the snow off his curling horns. He wrinkles his nose at her delighted laughter. “Not my favorite season, I must confess.”

“Are you appearing in my dreams just to talk about the weather,” she asks, obliquely amused. There was something inherently funny to the way he tipped his head from side to side, trying to avoid the snow that clung to his horns, his hair, the sharp tips of his ears. He looked like a cat with tape stuck to its paws and resented the universe at large for the indignity. 

“You called me,” he huffs. “I am here at your pleasure: so, you tell me what you wish to discuss. Clearly there’s some pressing concern given you rousted me out of a perfectly satisfying game of mah johng. I was _winning_.”

“I most certainly did no such thing,” she says, rebuke heavy in her tone.

He raises one sardonic eyebrow. “I wouldn’t be here unless you invited me,” he says. “So, I say again: you tell me.”

“Isn’t it vampires that need to be invited,” she muses, feeling a little dislocated from herself. Allura wonders if this is how Alice felt in Wonderland—a tangled mixture of annoyed, confused and amused. “Really, there’s an entire host of very polite supernatural beings when you think about it. Vampires only enter your home if you invite them by name, demons you have to call in advance, werewolves will shift back if you give them a hat and call their name. Honestly, I know college boys who could stand to take some lessons.”

He turns to look at her for a long moment, face scrunched up in a confused expression that can’t decide if it wants to be offended or amused, before he barks out a little laugh. “And the fae only take what you offer them,” he adds. “Though they have a very flexible definition of ‘offer’.”

“I’ll have to keep that in mind,” she tells him seriously. “But truly, why are we here? Or, I guess, why are you here? One of us isn’t where we should be.”

“Or life is a grand cosmic tapestry wrought by divine hands and we are each precisely where we need to be,” he says with the type of serenity that can only be mocking.

Allura digs her elbow into the hollow under his ribs and he flinches back from her with a little yip of pain. “That question was actually serious, jackass.”

“Such a _rude_ child,” he whines. “I try to impart wisdom to you and this is how you treat me, I am so offended.”

“You are nothing of the kind,” she says tartly. “And quoting lines that you’d find gracing a certain kind of inspirational poster in sarcastic tones is hardly ‘imparting wisdom’,” she does the little finger quotes making him snigger into one fist like a child—it's alarmingly endearing, “and if it is, I think I can do without it.”

“I could, you know,” he says, voice suddenly low and silken. She blinks when he slides into her space, sly and intimate. He tangles his fingers in her hair and smiles slowly at her. “I could open ancient libraries for you. Do you wish to read the forgotten works of Aedesia? The complete poetry of Sappho? I could bring these to you.”

For a moment, the space of a heartbeat, Allura is filled with a longing so intense it presses against her mouth like a physical force. She has to swallow it away like bile. Lance’s smile is entirely too knowing. She breathes out a breath that trembles in the air between them before saying, voice cracked slightly with longing, “No,” she swallows hard again. “No, thank you.”

He shrugs one slender shoulder as if he hadn’t just offered an entire epoch’s worth of knowledge. “Just a thought, if you’d like.”

“Only at the low cost of my soul,” she says, a little snide. It stings, wounds something in her, to know that he could offer such things with so little thought. 

Lance’s answering smile is full of a gentleness she’d not expected. “I don't think you’d mind so terribly much,” he says thoughtfully. “Being one of the Fallen. Gods help us all, you’d probably take over.”

Before she can come up with suitable response he places one talon against her lips delicately. Allura shivers at its sharpness, if he presses just a hair harder it would slice her lips open and leave them bleeding and something about sends a tendril of heat through her. Lance’s eyes crinkle like he can hear that thought and she can feel the flush bloom across her face like a sudden wildfire. She’s thankful for her dark skin tone and how it hides her flustered reactions.

“Good work, witchling,” he croons. “You resisted your first true offer.”

Allura jerks back from his hand, fury and humiliation flooding through her, and smacks her head hard against the headboard of her bed.

She sits up slowly, blinking at the pooling sunlight, before pressing a finger to her lips. Next she sees him, she decides, she’s going to smack him right into next week.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry it's been, like, a hot minute since I've written for this. I made myself sad with a different fic and needed something fluffy and weird to cheer myself up.
> 
> And since I got asked [Coran's Goth Playlist](https://playmoss.com/en/chronolith/playlist/sfd-coran-s-playlist). He was an angsty, angsty little thing as a teenager. Eligos/Lance had so much fun with him.
> 
> (edit: playmoss won't let me add any Siouxsie and the Banshees to this list and that is _bullshit_ )


End file.
